In the religious mindset of the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century West it was generally accepted that God addressed people directly by means of thunder and lightning. These were empyrean signs, usually betokening divine wrath and the coming Day of Judgement. Until the mid-eighteenth century, many, both Protestant and Catholic, regarded that as self-evident. Preaching was therefore intended to evoke penitence and repentance. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the newly-invented lightning rod deprived God of his supposed instrument of punishment and thus the nature of man's relationship with him was changed. Fatalism, though still endorsed by many, was gradually replaced by personal responsibility, which enabled man to utilise the rational preventive device that God had placed in his hands. Nature no longer posed a threat but was the result of God's marvellous work of creation, and could be understood through reason and increasingly also through feeling. God, man, and nature all worked in unison. So-called physico-theology stressed the goodness, wisdom, and omnipotence of the Creator evinced in the impressive natural phenomenon of the thunderstorm.